Connect with us

Press Release

Polywork 13m Series Horowitzkennedy Siliconrepublic

Published

on

polywork 13m horowitzkennedy siliconrepublic

polywork 13m series horowitzkennedy siliconrepublic:

Polywork, a business-focused social network in private beta that emphasizes the work people do over job titles, raises $13M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz

Polywork, founded by Peter Johnston, has concluded a Series A round that garnered funding from prominent Silicon Valley figures.

Peter Johnston, a Carrickfergus native and the founder of the business-focused social network Polywork, has secured a $13 million Series A financing, which was headed by Andreessen Horowitz (A16z).

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover, and Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison were among the illustrious investors that joined A16z.

Along with returning investors Bungalow Capital and 20VC, Goldcrest Capital and Caffeinated Capital were also present.

A draw of Polywork, which was established in 2020, is its creator, Johnston, a former Google employee who founded the freelancer-management software company Kalo (formerly known as Lystable) in 2015. The start-up received recurrent investments from Valar Ventures, graduated from Techstars in the UK, and amassed a clientele that included Google, Airbnb, and The Economist. However, Kalo suffered during the epidemic, so Johnston decided to close it down.

April saw the beta debut of Polywork, while May saw a $3.5 million seed investment. It has been compared to LinkedIn and Twitter by observers and early users, and Johnston has made it apparent that he wants to compete with the Microsoft-owned industry leader in professional networking.

He explained in an interview with Sifted that “our presentation to investors was essentially a reframe of what LinkedIn is attempting to achieve. How beneficial, for example, is a resume that includes a list of skills? What you do with your skills is more important to me than your skill set.

The major means of identification when letting someone know who you are are your work title or your place of education, both of which are rather bad indicators of who you really are and what you care about.

Numerous times in interviews and blog postings, Johnston has expressed his belief that individuals are “more than the labels society has imposed upon them, such as job titles,” and that he thinks Polywork will bridge the gap between the personal and professional in a manner that other social networks cannot. Users receive a Twitter-style feed where they may publish updates on their most recent work, and they can use tags or badges on their profiles to highlight their abilities and hobbies. Additionally, posts may be labelled, allowing you to view a user’s feed based on one of their interests or places of employment.

Following the investment, Sriram Krishnan of A16z will join the Polywork board.

“Earlier this year, we first learned about Polywork, and shortly after, we started noticing well-known internet personalities using it to share their stories. You pay attention when you hear buzz from online groups spanning tech, fashion, music, and more. And it became immediately apparent why Polywork was attracting everyone’s attention,” Krishnan remarked.

“The team was actually creating a network geared to represent the diverse nature of what we do as humans,” said one reviewer of Polywork.

Continue Reading

Press Release

Russian processor manufacturers are prohibited from using ARM because of UK sanctions.

Published

on

Russian processor manufacturers are prohibited from using ARM because of UK sanctions.

On Wednesday, the UK government expanded its list of sanctioned Russian organisations by 63. The two most significant chip manufacturers in Russia, Baikal Electronics and MCST (Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies), are among them.

Since the licensee, Arm Ltd., is situated in Cambridge, England, and must abide by the penalties, the two sanctioned firms will now be denied access to the ARM architecture.

contacting inactive entities

The UK government provided the following justification for the restrictive measures put in place against Baikal and MCST:

The clause’s goal is to persuade Russia to stop acting in a way that threatens Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty, or independence or that destabilises Ukraine.

The two companies are important to Russia’s ambitions to achieve technical independence since they are anticipated to step up and fill the gaps left by the absence of processors built by Western chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD.

The two currently available most cutting-edge processors are:

Eight ARM Cortex A57 cores running at 1.5 GHz and an ARM Mali-T628 GPU running at 750 MHz make up the 35 Watt Baikal BE-M1000 (28nm) processor.
MCST Elbrus-16S (28nm), a 16-core processor clocked at 2.0 GHz, is capable of 1.5 TFLOP calculations, which is a tenth of what an Xbox Series X can do. Baikal BE-S1000 (16nm), a 120 Watt processor featuring 48 ARM cores clocked at 2.0 GHz, MCST Elbrus-8C (28nm), a 70 Watt processor featuring eight cores clocked at 1.3 GHz,
Russian businesses and organisations that evaluated these chips in demanding applications claim that they fall short of industry standards and are even unacceptably priced.

Although the performance of these processors and the far poorer mid-tier and low-tier chips with the Baikal and MCST stickers is not very spectacular, they could keep some crucial components of the Russian IT sector operating amid shortages.

In reality, MCST recently bragged that it was “rushing to the rescue” of vital Russian enterprises and organisations, successfully filling the void left in the domestic market.

sanctions’ effects
Given that Russia has previously demonstrated its willingness to relax licencing requirements in order to mitigate the consequences of Western-imposed limitations, it is simple to discount the application and impact of the UK’s sanctions.

It is crucial to keep in mind that the Baikal and MCST processors are produced in foreign foundries, such as those owned by Samsung and TSMC, and that neither of them would violate Arm’s licencing policies or international law to serve Russian objectives.

The only option is to bring the production home and break the law as Baikal, which has a legitimate licence to produce at 16nm, only has a design licence for its next products.

The fact that chip fabrication in Russia can only now be done at the 90nm node level presents yet another significant issue. That was the same technology NVIDIA employed in 2006 for its GeForce 7000-series GPUs.

To combat this in April 2022, the Russian government has already approved an investment of 3.19 trillion rubles (38.2 billion USD), although increasing domestic production will take many years. In the best-case scenarios, 28nm circuits will be able to be produced by Russian foundries by 2030.

Continue Reading

Press Release

Zuckerberg says Facebook is dealing with Spotify on a songs assimilation job codenamed Task Boombox (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC).

Published

on

Facebook is dealing with Spotify on a songs

Zuckerberg says Facebook is working with Spotify on a music integration project codenamed Project Boombox (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC)

Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Zuckerberg says Facebook is working with Spotify on a music integration project codenamed Project Boombox  —  – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced that the company is building audio features where users can engage in real-time conversations with others.

Continue Reading

Press Release

THE UNITIONS OF WEARABLE DEVICE SHIPMENTS FOR 2020 GREW 28.4% TO 444.7M UNITS, TEAHING FROM APPLE, WHICH GREW 27.2% IN Q4 AND HAS 36.2% MARKETSHARE, FOLLOWED BY XIAOMI AT *9% (IDC).

Published

on

WEARABLE DEVICE SHIPMENTS FOR 2020

Wearable device shipments for 2020 grew 28.4% to 444.7M units globally, led by Apple which grew 27.2% in Q4 and has 36.2% marketshare, followed by Xiaomi at ~9%  —  Worldwide shipments of wearable devices reached 153.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2020 (4Q20), a year-over-year increase …

Continue Reading

Trending